786 Keep Your Standards High with Phil Rosenthal

This is five minute Friday.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with an incredible human being. His name is Phil Rosenthal, and he's an American television writer and producer who is best known as the Creator, writer and executive producer for the sitcom everybody loves Raymond. He has had 70 Emmy nominations for his show and won two Emmys, also an author and currently producing a new show, I'll have what Phil's having.

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Did you feel like your identity was tied up in this show? for that long or do you feel.

Like, yeah, that's what I do. That's who I am. I make that show and I'm proud of it and I'm gonna work my butt off to make sure it's good every week. There's a, some shows are better than others, how could they not be? But there's a level you should never go below. I learned that in school too. We had a professor who said, there's a level of quality you can't go below. And if we keep that line in our heads, Maybe our work is better, right?

Yeah.

Otherwise we have no standards. Right. So it's good to have standards.

What was a show that you did that you felt like it went below there?

That... Everything else. Everything else.

Yeah.

Because look, I had, as my friend used to say, you got the horses on that show. You know, you got the horses, meaning the great actors.

Yeah.

And the great writers too. I had everything working right.

And you're at the right time?

Yes, I try in my work not to go below a certain level that I can live with and I quit. I quit if it's not good. And when I go and speak to kids at schools, I go to colleges and talk to people sometimes, I tell them that I'm only half joking. If you take one thing away from this meeting today, always quit.

Okay.

What does that mean? Quit if the iced tea isn't cold enough? No. If the level is unsatisfactory to you, if you feel like you're getting so many notes that it's now diminished what you had in mind, you have no recourse but to leave. All we come with is ourselves and all we can go with is with ourselves, right?

Sure, sure.

So, no, you cannot ruin me. I won't allow it. I have standards if you don't. Now, am I being political when I do that? Am I playing them? Am I trying for something? No, I really mean it. When I quit and it's agonizing, it's not something I do lightly. But sometimes you have to go because it's not going to be right. And if it's not right and you've tried everything, I'm not saying quit on the first day. I'm saying you've tried everything. You see the train is going to hit that wall. Jump off that train.

Yeah, right, right.

Jump off that train. We try to, if the train is gonna hit the wall, we try to take the wheel. We try to steer it so it doesn't. But if you see it the last minute, oh my God, you gotta get out of there. You gotta, you gotta, because your name is all you have.

And when did you realize that it was like, now's the time, was it the, you know, the seventh season where you're like, okay, maybe I've got a couple seasons left, or was it like, during the last season, you're like, no, this is it.

No, I planned it.

Really?

Yeah.

Because I learned from the shows that I loved that went before us. You know, smart. Well, why not learn from the best? So you see these things that you love and you try to emulate them. You try to use the good examples then.

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